Richard Thompson (long) (and I'm not kidding)

How the hell did we get from an offhand mention in the John Mayer thread to this?

Over the past few months, I’ve enjoyed reading the thoughts of a lot of you guys who are analyzing and appreciating music that I was listening to, new, when I was (what I imagine to be) roughly your ages. It’s amazing what I can still discover after reading a new perspective on music I’ve known for years.

And after some discussions of various guitar players, it occurred to me that (not surprisingly) a lot of you probably aren’t aware of the work of Richard Thompson, who happens to be my favorite guitarist of all time, and an amazing songwriter.

I long ago gave up trying to figure out why he's never had the following of, say, a Neil Young or Van Morrison: popular music's a fickle beast, and sometimes just the wrong idiosyncracy or a bit of bad timing here or there can be the difference between being accepted and being ignored. I'm just glad he's still out there making music-- and like Young, still at the peak of his powers.

I started thinking about this, then started typing after I finished my lunch, and before I knew it, I had about five typed pages, and wasn’t really through half of Thompson’s career.

So, this is the first part of an album-by-album rundown of Richard Thompson’s career. In order to maintain my sanity, though, I’m only going to cover regular albums where he’s the (or at least a) principal songwriter, and not get into guest appearances or soundtracks.

This isn’t intended as a buyer’s guide, really, since it covers decades’ worth of music. And the happy thing about Thompson’s career is that, after having endured years of major-label neglect in America, almost everything he’s ever recorded is currently in print and easily available on CD/mp3 download. So while no one’s going to rush out and buy everything here, you probably won’t have difficulty finding any of these that sound interesting. As I cover each period, I'll try to recommend some starters.

As a guitarist, Thompson really doesn’t sound like anyone else (or that was the case when he started, anyway; he’s influenced dozens of players over the years, the most obvious—or blatant, some would say—being Mark Knopfler). He knows his American blues and rock, but avoids their clichés (save when he’s employing them to purpose), and instead reaches in and around rock to jazz, folk, and classical sources, coming up with an electric (and eclectic) style that blends equal parts Charlie Christian, Dick Dale, and The Chieftains. He’s also quite possibly the best solo acoustic player that the “rock” world has produced since Nick Drake (whose first album Thompson played on).

In 1967, just past his 18th birthday, Thompson was the lead guitarist and a principal writer of original material for Fairport Convention, the first British “folk-rock” band. Their self-titled debut already demonstrates that Thompson is a stunningly accomplished guitarist for his age, as well as demonstrating his gift for off-kilter songwriting (“It’s Alright, Ma, It’s Only Witchcraft”). There’s a goofy folkie/hippie quality to some of the rest of the band’s material (they were sometimes referred to as the British answer to Jefferson Airplane) and when Thompson’s guitar cuts through it’s almost startling. Bear in mind, he was playing professionally for a couple of years before this, and was already developing his style at the same as guys like Clapton, Page, and Hendrix, building from some of the same sources that inspired them, but already starting to reach outside those sources.

The second Fairport album, What We Did On Our Holidays, sees the addition of vocalist/writer Sandy Denny (worthy of a thread of her own), and she and Thompson mesh as though they’d been at it for years. Though Denny contributes several excellent songs, Thompson’s already starting to explore the depths of the human soul's darkness in ways that are simply astounding from a young man of 19 (“Take the sun from my heart/
Let me learn to despise” he sings in “Tale in Hard Times”), but he also provides one of the greatest songs ever written on the acceptance of the inevitabilities of age and death, “Meet On The Ledge.”

The third Fairport album, Unhalfbricking, was a rushed release, which has less original material than the two previous albums—though, perversely, it includes arguably the high point of Fairport’s recorded career: Denny’s stunning “Who Knows Where The Time Goes.” It also has the best assortment of Dylan covers to ever grace a non-Byrds album, most notably “Si Tu Dois Partir” (“If You Gotta Go, Go Now”, sung in French).

1969’s Liege and Lief (which, amusingly, was finally awarded a Gold Record about two years ago) was the first Fairport album released in the US, and is the sound that most listeners who know the band at all associate with the name: stately, epic, and even more closely fixed in the British soil, with Denny and Thompson holding the listener rapt with the long, twisting tales of “Matty Groves” and “Tam Lin.” Two of Thompson’s compositions (“Farewell, Farewell,” and “Crazy Man Michael”) are rooted in traditional British folk subject matter, but with his own mordant touches.

At this point, Denny strikes out on her own, and the band begins a retreat away from original material to more electric updates of traditional fare on Full House. Thompson manages to turn out a couple of good songs within that context (including “Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman”), but he’s starting to feel that his writing, while springing from many of the same roots as the band’s more traditional material, is being stifled by the need for democracy among the band members, and in 1971, he sets off on his own.

Fairport, by the way, has continued recording ever since, with shifting membership, and while they’ve never duplicated the genius of the Thompson/Denny days, their stuff can still be pleasant enough, and certainly brilliantly executed. Thompson continues to reunite with his old mates (the survivors, anyway) onstage at the annual Cropredy music festival.

There’s a couple of good Fairport collections out there that do the band proud. I think that the double-disk Fairport Chronicles is currently out of print, but Meet On The Ledge: The Classic Years is a decent single disk that covers most of the important material. Check the dates if you see a different title, since the post-Thompson band has released a few collections as well.

Recent years have also seen the release of a lot of live Thompson-era Fairport material. Live at the Troubadour, from 1970, has a freshness and urgency that’s breathtaking. Heyday is a compilation of their BBC appearances over several years, so it’s naturally less organic, but ranges more widely, and is generally better recorded.

And I appear to have run into a character limit with this post, so I guess I'll break it up and move on to Richard's post-Fairport years.

Thompson’s solo career launches with Richard Thompson Starring as Henry the Human Fly, in 1972. Though some of his Fairport mates play on it, Thompson's voice begins to emerge fully, as he opens with “Roll Over Vaughan Williams,” a song which states his position as well as anything he’s ever written: Chuck Berry’s fine and all that (in fact, Thompson has huge respect for, and knows, classic American blues, R&B, and rock and roll better than most Americans), but when it’s time for Thompson to get the kids up and on their feet, he exhorts them not to dance, but to “Live in fear / Run for cover, things are bad / But now they’re getting worse”, sung in his jolliest tone. He turns traditional songwriting on its head with the jokey “Nobody’s Wedding,” and “The New Saint George”, plays it gorgeously straight with “The Poor Ditching Boy” and “Painted Ladies”, and brings his own Dylan-like weirdness to “Twisted” and “The Angels Took My Racehorse Away.” Thompson is fond of claiming this to be the worst-selling LP in Warner Brothers’ history, and it certainly has nothing about it to suggest that it was an overlooked hit. Not only is it highly idiosyncratic, but Thompson’s still learning to sing (his voice reedier than it is today, and more nasal), and he doesn’t stretch out much on guitar. Not for the new listener, but if you come to enjoy Thompson’s other material, definitely worth seeking out.

Maybe the most important thing that came out of Henry was that Denny introduced Thompson to backup singer Linda Peters. The two soon married, and, as a duo, recorded several of the greatest albums ever released, on either side of the Atlantic.

1974’s I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, credited to Richard and Linda Thompson, begins with another of Thompson’s jolly ruminations on the end of life (“When I Get to the Border”), and at first sounds very Fairport-like. Gears shift immediately with “The Calvary Cross,” one of the most-requested songs at Thompson’s live shows: a dark fantasy (“I was under the Calvary Cross / The pale-faced lady she said to me / I’ve watched you with my one green eye / And I’ll hurt you ‘till you need me”) punctuated with some expressive guitar playing.

And then Linda shows up. Her first vocal solo is Richard's song “Withered and Died”, and her performance is absolutely stunning, her voice at once mature but young and almost girlish, and with what sounds like decades of hard-won wisdom and life experience behind it: “This cruel country has driven me down / Teased me and lied, teased me and lied / I’ve only sad stories to tell to this town / My dreams have withered and died.”

And at this point, Thompson almost cedes the album to her, providing his new bride with amazing song after song: “Down Where The Drunkards Roll”, “The Little Beggar Girl”, “Has He Got A Friend For Me”, “The Great Valerio”. Most of which show up in Thompson’s live sets now and again, but infrequently, as if he understands the impossibility of living up to her standard. Richard does get in one last shot, singing the acid lullaby “End of the Rainbow” (“Life seems so rosy in the cradle / but I’ll be a friend, I’ll tell you what’s in store / There’s nothing at the end of the rainbow / There’s nothing to grow up for anymore”). If neither Thompson had ever recorded again, this album would be a career’s worth of brilliance.

But they did!

Hokey Pokey was the first of two albums they released in 1975 (and the first Thompson since Henry to be released in the US; Bright Lights wouldn’t make it over here for another couple of years). It’s looser and funnier than Bright Lights, with tall tales, lewd jokes, and black humor (“I’ll Regret It All in the Morning”). It rocks a bit more, too, but also shows Thompson’s arranging growing more varied and sophisticated on tracks like “The Egypt Room” and “The Sun Never Shines On the Poor” (one thing that keeps some listeners from warming to Thompson is his willingness to stray far outside the norms of rock instrumentation, with accordion, shawm, fiddle, krumhorn, hurdy-gurdy, or brass band if it suits him).

Hokey Pokey’s tone is sometimes so light that you almost think the Thompsons have left the darkness behind, until Linda gets to “Never Again” and the aching “A Heart Needs A Home” (“I came to you when /No one could hear me /I’m sick and weary / Of being alone /Empty streets and Hungry faces /The world’s no place when you’re on your own / A heart needs a home”). This album also features a more confident use of harmony between the two singers, adding another extra musical texture.

The second of 1975’s albums, Pour Down Like Silver, is the first one written principally after Richard’s conversion to a somewhat mystical branch of Islam known as Sufi, which led him, for a time, to question the value of working as a popular musician. He and Linda appear on the cover wearing turbans (and looking at least mystical, if not outright stoned), but Thompson’s music has always been suffused with an appreciation of the spiritual, if not often with an accompanying promise of redemption. And though the album begins with the Thompsons walking “The Streets of Paradise”, it’s clear that Richard’s view of “Paradise” is as bleak and clear-eyed as you might expect from him; indeed, there is virtually nothing in Thompson’s writing career that separates his post-conversion work from what came before. “For Shame of Doing Wrong” is a devastating picture of guilt and regret (“I wish I was a fool for you again…”), and “Beat the Retreat” is a sort of answer song that introduces a familiar Thompson theme: love and sex as battlefield (“I’m trailing my colours / Back home to you / I’ll follow the drum / Back home to you”). “Night Comes In” features Richard’s first really extended guitar workout of his solo career, and it’s gorgeous, building from the slow, stately minor-key melody into a quiet thunderhead of pain, before Linda closes things out with the wistfully beautiful “Dimming of the Day” (“This old house is falling down around my ears / I’m drowning in the river of my tears / When all my will is gone you hold me sway / I need you at the dimming of the day”).

At this point, Richard Thompson withdrew from making music for a couple of years, and when he and Linda re-emerged in 1978, his label sent him to L.A. to try and enlist some session musicians to help him craft a hit. The result, First Light, is the weakest of the Richard and Linda albums, since the band and singers really don’t serve each other well. There’s some great songwriting (“Strange Affair”, “Don’t Let a Thief Steal Into Your Heart”, and the title song), but there are better versions of each of them on some of Thompson’s various reissues or live albums.

And, unsurprisingly, there were no hits (though the Pointer Sisters had a minor hit with their cover of “Don’t Let a Thief Steal Into Your Heart”), which resulted in the Thompsons’ next album, 1979’s Sunnyvista, not even being released in the U.S.

Sunnyvista’s kind of an oddball: at times, Richard almost seems to be trying to be the hopeless cynic that a surface reading of his work can suggest (and a few songs, including the title track, are the most heavy-handed pieces of “satire” he’s ever written), but it’s also full of loose and relaxed stuff like “Saturday Rolling Around”, and honesty and exposure on songs like “Lonely Hearts” and Linda’s aching trio vocal with Kate and Anna McGarrigle on “Sisters” (“We were sisters / 'Til love came between us and pulled us apart / Don't call me your sister and put a knife through my heart”). This one sold even less.

The Thompsons spend the next couple of years quitting music, then starting up again, gigging, working, trying new producers and new labels, with nothing released… and, incidentally, having their marriage disintegrate.

[character limit again!]

It’s often assumed that 1982’s Shoot Out The Lights was the product of their dissolving marriage, and anyone who saw their subsequent tour of the States could feel the pain and tension in the air. The fact is, though, much of the material was written during the previous few years, and a few of the songs had even been recorded once already, for an aborted album more than a year earlier.

But I’ve always believed that you trust the art more than the artist, and even if songs like “Don’t Renege On Our Love”, “A Man In Need” and “Back Street Slide” don’t reflect the specific facts of the Thompsons’ personal lives at the time of writing, there was clearly something inside Richard that knew what was coming (it was he who’d been carrying on an affair, barely bothering to hide it from Linda). Certainly, Linda gives “Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed?” a reading so shattered that you can’t even imagine it coming from anywhere but her deepest feelings.

(Parenthetically, of course, where it came from was Richard, who in his writing was either already flagellating himself for his transgressions, or working from an imagination even more prescient than previously supposed).

And it’s certainly worth noting that the album ends with Richard and Linda harmonizing to beat the Everly Brothers on one of the most hopeful songs he’s ever written: “Wall of Death”, which tells us that the pain of love is a carnival ride that we just have to try at least one more time.

Beyond the emotional gutpunch of the album, Shoot Out The Lights is the album where Richard Thompson starts to bring his guitar to the fore, something that will continue to grow as he moves through his solo career. While there is brilliant playing on all his previous albums, his time away from music (he supposedly went nearly a year without picking up a guitar) has clearly invigorated his playing, and the title song remains one of the greatest rock guitar songs of all time, with Thompson demonstrating once again his deep knowledge of his predecessors (the song’s main riff builds off Link Wray’s “Rumble”), going from deep Duane Eddy twang to a broken, atonal cry of pain as he brings the song to a close. Thompson’s virtuosity has never been a matter of his speed (though he’s no slowpoke), but in his willingness to make musical choices that in most players’ hands simply wouldn’t work. There is nowhere in the song “Shoot Out the Lights” to extrapolate this guitar solo, and after it’s over, you can’t imagine it any other way (though he’s got several live versions that, at the very least, equal, if not exceed, the studio cut).

While, as I say, all of the Richard and Linda material is currently in print, there is no comprehensive collection. The Best of the Island Years is a well-chosen set that covers the four albums from Bright Lights through Pour Down, but those four are worth owning on their own, anyway. As is Shoot Out the Lights. I’d start with that album, move on to Bright Lights, Hokey Pokey, and Pour Down (in that order), and only look for First Light and Sunnyvista after that. There is also a very good live album from 1975 that was just released a couple of years ago.

Linda also released a solo album (One Clear Moment) that managed to provide a hit to Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris when they covered her song "Telling Me Lies". But the stress of the divorce cost Linda her voice: she suffered from what is called "hysterical dysphonia": she could speak, but not sing. This continued, with brief periods of respite, for two decades. She has recently returned to recording, with the albums Give Me A Sad Song , Fashionably Late, and Versatile Heart, often in collaboration with her (and Richard's) son Teddy; Richard himself contributes a bit of guitar. The material on the albums is pleasant enough, and her voice remains an amazing instrument, but there's nothing that's a patch on what she recorded with Richard.

Going to take a break at this point, and will move on to Richard Thompson’s formal solo career later today or tomorrow.

Oh hell yes. These days, the Thompson I listen to most are the "authorized bootleg" live albums he releases through his website. When I get through the solo stuff, maybe I'll run those down, too.

In particular, since he hooked up with his old friend and acoustic bassist Danny Thompson (no relation), and added drummer Michael Jerome, he's got the strongest rhythm section he's ever worked with.

Not to jump ahead too far, but there is a track from one of those "private-label" live releases that was available on an EP that iTunes had a while back (not sure if they still do). It's called "Hard On Me." It's not his most inspired piece of songwriting (it's one of those tunes he seems to have written as an excuse for guitar breaks), but it is one of the great rock and roll performances ever captured. After a couple iterations of the chorus/verse, he takes a shattering guitar solo. Another chorus, then Danny Thompson does a bass solo that compares with anything John Entwistle (whom I love) ever did. And then Richard really gets started, with another guitar break that slaps the first one down like it never happened, and just takes off into realms of screaming sound and pain that completely belies the song's rather simplistic (well, simplistic for him) lyric. It's like the Stratocaster was invented for this recording.

And a lot of people still think of him as a "folkie"!

Yeah, that sounds like a fun thing to see (I'm a big RVW fan, myself).

And I wasn't so much alluding to the song's specific text, but the notion that the American blues/rock tradition gets you up on the dance floor, regardless of what's at stake, whereas Thompson's staking out what might be a more British approach in his writing.

Jumping ahead again, it's somewhat like his song "MGB-GT": a song about love for a car that deliberately turns the Chuck Berry/Beach Boys approach to such things on its head, and comes up with its British equivalent.

I’m going to spend a bit more time on 1983’s Hand of Kindness than on future releases, because it stands as one of the most important albums in Thompson’s career, as it was his first studio outing without Linda (ever, really, since she had sung backup on a few tracks on Henry).

Imagine: he’s just broken through the glass ceiling of hopeless cult status. Shoot Out the Lights sold a bit better than his previous albums had—nothing massive, but on a level that can sustain an artist for a (modest) career. On top of that, it was on every Top Ten list that year, and on more than one it was named Album of the Year, over such contenders as Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, and Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom.

This’d all be great, of course, except that he’d also just been through a miserable and highly public divorce. He'd lost not only his wife and lover, but the voice that had carried so many of his words so perfectly. There would be an unusually large number of eyes and ears waiting on his next release, and not always for reasons he’d have wished. Hand of Kindness, then, had all manner of expectations to meet.

Hand of Kindness leads off with “Tear Stained Letter,” one of the handful of Thompson songs that non-fans might have heard, as it’s been covered by both country and Cajun artists; not surprising, as the bright, high-stepping tune and arrangement are a perfect meld of the two. Continuing from where Shoot Out The Lights left off, Hand of Kindness sees Thompson bringing his guitar more into the spotlight—as a way to fill the gap left by the absence of Linda’s voice? Perhaps. Thompson has always insisted that he views his “job” as songwriting, and singing, with guitar playing an adjunct to both. And in his studio recordings he had always placed his playing very much at the service of the song, rather than vice versa. Now, though, he’s starting to allow his guitar its own voice. He still generally reserves extended soloing for a live setting, but more and more he uses the instrument to comment on the lyrics, to provide not just color and texture, but to step out and let it sing. Over the rest of his career, he’ll demonstrate that he can do more with twenty or thirty seconds of guitar break than most players could manage in five minutes of soloing.

And that’s heard to brilliant advantage on “Tear Stained Letter,” where the inescapable dance-floor hijinks are introduced with some bouncy accordion and saxophone, with a quick taste of Richard’s guitar, gone before you’ve had time to savor it. After the final verse, the sax and accordion engage in a wild back-and-forth instrumental break… then back comes that familiar Stratocaster, taking the song out with a solo of such bite and fluidity that you immediately stop and play the track again to try and grab every nuance. “Tear Stained Letter” is one of Thompson’s live staples, and there is an absolutely insane version that opens the Live in Providence DVD that he put out a couple of years ago (it’s commercially available). You have barely had time to, figuratively, find your seat at the show and he’s already tearing the roof off the place, drawing that solo out with cascades of sound that just seem like they’ll build and build forever—and, again, that’s just the show opener.

Regardless of how we view the timing of Shoot Out The Lights relative to the Thompsons’ marital problems, there was no question that his followup would be heavily scrutinized for “clues” to the messy breakup. Knowing that, Thompson would seem to have two choices: bare his soul about it, or ignore it altogether. Typically, he does both, and neither.

“Tear Stained Letter” is certainly redolent with feelings that might well have been Thompson’s in the wake of the breakup: “It was three in the morning when she took me apart / She wrecked the furniture, she wrecked my heart / She danced on my head like Arthur Murray / The scars ain’t never going to mend in a hurry.” But the stinger comes with the next line: “Just when I thought I could learn to forget her / Right through the door came a tear-stained letter.” There’s not the slightest reason to imagine that Linda ever issued any tearful plea to her departing husband, and as the song goes on, the singer sounds less like Richard, and the situation less like the Thompsons’, and more like an example of Thompson making the personal universal. And where other writers might channel their pain into a ballad or plaintive confessional piece, Thompson’s protagonist is staggering through a comic hangover (“My head was beating like a song by The Clash / Writing checks that my body couldn’t cash / I got to my feet, I was reeling and dizzy”), his voice dancing almost drunkenly over the rollicking accompaniment, taking grim satisfaction as he calls back to his former lover “Cry, cry, if it makes you feel better / Set it all down in a tear-stained letter.” It’s certainly one of the happiest songs about misery you’re ever likely to hear.

The rest of the album teases the possibility here and there that there’s Thompson-split confessions to be heard (“Oh how I wanted to / to say I love you”), most notably on the title track (“Well I wove the rope, and I picked the spot / Well, I stuck out my neck, and I tightened the knot”) but viewed from the distance of years, those specifics lose importance. The inevitability of pain and betrayal in human relationships (romantic and otherwise) will continue to occupy his writing long after any wounds from the divorce have healed, but his eye and ear are so sharp that the listener often wants the songs to be about Thompson, because otherwise they might well be about us: if Thompson’s prepared to admit that he can be a betrayer and a lout, what defense have I got?

Another noteworthy track here is “The Wrong Heartbeat,” a bouncy rocker with another great solo which became Thompson’s first “rock video” (coincidentally shot by a college friend of mine, though I didn’t find that out till a year or so later), taking Richard through a succession of scenes intended to parody various rock video clichés of the day. Haven’t been able to find it on youtube, but I’d love to see it again some day.

“Wrong Heartbeat” is, by the way, another example of how easy it is to fall into the trap of assuming that Thompson (or any songwriter) is writing his autobiography every time he picks up the pen, or sings in the first person. While the song’s text might suggest Richard moving bravely on to find Linda’s replacement while cautioning her not to trifle with his affections, in fact it’s one of the songs that he’d written years before for Linda to sing, and she had actually recorded it for the abandoned 1981 album.

Instrumentally, Hand of Kindness ranges from the slow and plaintive “How I Wanted To”, to the cheerfully acid “A Poisoned Heart and a Twisted Memory”, the aching “Devonside”, to the shattering title cut which is the first of several visits Thompson will make back to the emotional and musical territory of “Shoot Out The Lights,” with a similarly memorable guitar solo. The album concludes with “Two Left Feet”, a mad hornpipe where Thompson cautions his new lover that she’d better sharpen up her moves (“I dance with you and I land on my seat / That’s ‘cause you dance with two left feet / Dance with Jimmy, dance with Pete / But don't dance with me with those two left feet”), set to one of Thompson’s catchiest, trickiest tunes, with sax, accordion, and guitar trading off wild instrumental breaks.

Hand of Kindness has stood up over the years far better than most albums I bought in 1983. There are times when the production’s just a bit too heavy, with the barrage of different instruments fighting for primacy with Richard’s voice, and Dave Mattacks’ drumming works much better on the uptempo numbers than the slow ones, where he has a tendency to plod. But about half of the eight songs rank with his best, and only “Both Ends Burning” (a mildly amusing metaphor about a racehorse that needs to gallop, but barely trots) feels skippable when I listen to it today.

As I say, I don’t plan to go on at such length about future albums (though god knows this went longer than I’d planned, so who knows), but the next two (which I hope to get to later today) have a special significance for me: after Hand of Kindness sold respectably, it was time for Richard to try a major label again; and in this case, he came to the one I happened to be working for at the time.

Again, going to try to keep these a bit shorter.

1985: Across A Crowded Room. One of my personal favorite Thompson albums, and not just because at the time of its release, I was working for Polygram (parent company for Polydor, the label Thompson signed with). Partially, it’s the sound: the production is a return to the clarity of Shoot Out the Lights, with Richard’s voice and guitar clearly out front, and the other instruments adding texture here and there. But it’s also a great set of songs. In an odd way, it reminds me of Darkness on the Edge of Town: like Springsteen, this album is where Thompson has started to pare down his writing, saying more in less time.

The album opens with “When the Spell is Broken”, with a doom-laden guitar figure (the first song I ever learned in drop-D tuning) underlying the song’s snapshot of that moment when love ends: “When the spell is broken/ all the joy is gone from her face/ welcome back to the human race.”

This song also points out one of the things I love about Thompson’s playing: the guitar solo, naturally, is a terrific one. Now in the years since, Thompson has released four different live recordings of this song (one a solo acoustic performance). And in every case, the solos are completely different. Not simply variations on the studio recording, but structurally new, as though he’s rethinking the song from the ground up each time. And that’s true of other songs like “Shoot Out The Lights” and “Tear Stained Letter” that have appeared on several of his live recordings.

(Speaking of “live” Thompson, he toured twice when he was with Polydor, and I had chances to meet him both times, and despite his evidently being a shy person by nature, he was invariably relaxed and funny).

Other high points include “You Don’t Say”, which is the only song of his that I’ve ever imagined might actually be inspired by his divorce: friends are telling the singer that they met his old flame recently, and that while she still feels hurt and betrayed, she wants him to come back and try again. But the singer has already moved on, and can only marvel that “Do you mean she still cares? You don’t say.” “Love in a Faithless Country” is set to an eerie three-note figure like something out of a horror movie, and we perceive the singer to be some kind of con man or criminal as he intones advice: “Always make your best moves late at night / Always keep your tools well out of sight / It never pays to work the same town twice,” before he pulls the rug out, and the guitar slashes into the snarled chorus: “That’s the way that we make love.”

“Little Blue Number” is a lithe rocker that features a couple of great solos. It’s ostensibly an attack on a fashionista (male or female, we’re not told) who apes the style of everyone around them (a topic he’s written on more than once), but there are those who perceive it as an attack on musicians who have co-opted his style (Knopfler is usually cited as the target). That seems unlikely to me—among other things, I don’t know of anyone who’s tried to cop Thompson’s songwriting, which I know he regards as more important than his guitar style—but you never know. He’s not above a bit of criticism of other musicians:

A few years back, Kenny G announced that he was going to record a “duet” with Louis Armstrong, playing over his classic “What A Wonderful World.” At the time, Pat Metheny was quoted as criticizing the idea, but Thompson, outraged, went further. He wrote a sharp, catchy, scandalously funny song called “I Agree With Pat Metheny” (“I agree with Pat Metheny / Kenny’s talents are too teeny”) that he only performed in concert, but it’s absolutely hysterical.

And that’s another thing you miss about Thompson until you see him in a live setting: his sense of humor and dry wit. Most live recordings omit between-song chat and banter for time considerations, but there’s a few complete recordings out there (one from last year might still be up at npr.com) that show a bit of it; it really rounds out the picture, and helps to explain why people seeing him live go from being fans to fanatics.

Returning to Across A Crowded Room: With one possible exception (“Walking in a Wasted Land” is just a bit too on-the-nose in its attack on Thatcherite England), there’s not a duff cut on the album, from the hard-rocking plaint of “She Twists the Knife Again” to another of Thompson’s skewed analogies for the dangers of love (“Fire in the Engine Room”), to the literally haunting “Ghosts in the Wind.” Depending on which version of the CD you find, there might be a bonus track called “Shine On Love” (which isn’t memorable) or “Where the Wind Don’t Whine” (which is actually a pretty good song).

And, of course, we worked hard to get the album noticed, to get "Spell" on the radio and MTV, co-ordinate in-store appearances, etc. Didn't help. I think the album sold marginally better than Hand of Kindness, but that's about it. It was particularly tough for me: for most people at the company, Thompson was a job, like any other; for me, getting the word out about his music was more like a calling, and I was pretty disappointed. But the next year, we got another chance.

1986: Daring Adventures. It’s interesting that many Thompson fans regard this as one of his lesser outings, despite the fact that it concludes with a song that is one of the two or three best that he’s written. Production, again, may be part of the problem. Polydor hooked him up with producer Mitchell Froom (who worked with Crowded House and Los Lobos, among others), and by all reports Thompson was pleased with the instrumental textures that Froom brought to the recording: it doesn’t have the post-Fairport sound of a lot of the Richard and Linda albums (or Hand of Kindness), but neither is it as clean and direct as Shoot Out or Crowded Room. And with an artist whose style was, by this time, pretty well set by two decades of recording and performing, I think Thompson welcomed another perspective on his music. That’s not to say that the album is a radical departure, but you know how cult audiences can be: even slight variations can weigh heavily. And the goofiness of “A Bone Through Her Nose” or “Baby Talk” can seem even more trivial with the 80’s percussion and synth touches that crop up there and there. It’s true, though, that sometimes the songwriting treads familiar ground in a manner just a bit too familiar, with songs like “Dead Man’s Handle” and “Long Dead Love” feeling like Across A Crowded Room outtakes.

But there’s great stuff here, too, including the riff-rocking “Valerie”, the aching “Jennie”, and what Thompson has called “the cynic’s love song”, “Nearly in Love”: "You're the one I've wanted so long /But then again I might be wrong / I'm almost aware of walking on air / I’ve never felt like this before That's why I want to make quite sure /That it's not just a dose of the flu /That gives me the chills for you/I'm nearly in love.”

But all of this is just preliminary. The penultimate song, “How Will I Ever Be Simple Again” is a Thompson original with a melody and subject as timeless as any folk song: a soldier finds himself in a devastated landscape, with a young girl who “danced in the street with the guns all around her”, who sings like a child, and fishes for her dinner despite their being “nothing but fever and ghosts in the water.” The soldier reflects that “War was my love and my friend and companion /And what did I care for the pretty and plain / But her smile was so clear and my heart was so troubled / Oh how will I ever be simple again / In her poor burned-out house I sat at her table /The smell of her hair was like cornfields in May /And I wanted to weep and my eyes ached from trying /Oh how will I ever be simple again” In the end, he remembers “So graceful she moved through the dust and the ruin / And happy she was in her dances and games / Oh teach me to see with your innocent eyes, love / Oh how will I ever be simple again.” It’s a gorgeous performance, and any songwriter would be proud to end an album on it.

But Thompson’s got one more up his sleeve: the album ends with "Al Bowlly’s in Heaven" which I regard as one of the great songs written in the 20th century, and I know the standard songbook pretty well.

The narrator is an old soldier (the same one from the previous song? Maybe), a WWII veteran. He’s living on the streets of London now, keeping himself going with memories of the days when he was a handsome young man, dancing to the big-band sounds of British crooner Al Bowlly (who died in a Nazi bombing raid). The song is sung to an understated blues-jazz arrangement, underlined with Thompson’s Django-like guitar.

With its level of detail and evocative setting, it’s worth quoting in its entirety:

Well we were heroes then, and the girls were all pretty
And a uniform was a lucky charm, bought you the key to the city
We used to dance the whole night through
While Al Bowlly sang "The Very Thought Of You"
Now Bowlly's in heaven and I'm in limbo now

Well I gave my youth to king and country
But what's my country done for me but sentenced me to misery
I traded my helmet and my parachute
For a pair of crutches and a demob suit
Al Bowlly's in heaven and I'm in limbo now

Hard times, hard hard times
Hostels and missions and dosser's soup lines
Can't close me eyes on a bench or a bed
For the sound of some battle raging in my head

Old friends, you lose so many
You get run around, all over town
The wear and the tear, oh it just drives you down
St Mungo's with its dirty old sheets
Beats standing all day down on Scarborough Street
Al Bowlly's in heaven and I'm in limbo now

Can't stay here, you got to foot-slog
Once in a blue moon you might find a job
Sleep in the rain, you sleep in the snow
When the beds are all taken you've got nowhere to go

Well I can see me now, I'm back there on the dance floor
Oh with a blonde on me arm, red-head to spare
Spit on my shoes and shine in me hair
And there's Al Bowlly, he's up on a stand
Oh that was a voice and that was a band
Al Bowlly's in heaven and I'm in limbo now

Weirdly, while some excellent live versions of the song have been released on compliations, the original studio version is only available on Daring Adventures, which goes in and out of print. There's a new 4-disk Thompson box set coming out in August, which will be a pretty comprehensive career retrospective, but even that will include a recent live version instead of the original.

We really pulled out the stops for this album. It came stickered with a gushing quote from Elvis Costello, and we pushed it hard at album radio stations (in a nice bit of irony, we were told to make comparisons to Dire Straits!), but “Nearly in Love” stiffed as a single, and the album sold no better than its predecessor. The spell was now broken between Richard and Polydor, and he moved on.

Yeah, that's one reason I'm not covering the live stuff in any detail at this point: I really think it's best to start with the original "blueprint" version of his songs; makes it much easier to appreciate what he then does with them in concert.

And I think I mentioned it before, but Jerome is far and away my favorite percussionist that Thompson has ever worked with, and combined with Danny Thompson, as great a rhythm section as I think I've ever seen.

Even among critics who admire him, Thompson often gets taken for granted, and the Capitol Records phase of his career kind of cements that, with Froom’s kitchen-sink productions tending to obscure the timelessness of Thompson’s work with what he (and Thompson too, probably) believed to be a patina of contemporary sound that would broaden his appeal. Not that the albums aren’t great (they are), but they do sometimes feel as though Froom is continuing to search for a “Richard Thompson sound” that, after 20-plus years, is already pretty well established, and as a rule the Froom-produced albums don’t flow as well as some of the earlier or later albums. 1988’s Amnesia, as an example, features something like twenty different musicians, including classical composer/conductor Philip Pickett (on such instruments as curtal, shawm, Peking that, and bass racket), Weather Report percussionist Alex Acuna, and prog-rock’s go-to Chapman Stick guy Tony Levin. Actually, given all that, it’s probably a wonder that the album sounds as good as it does.

Amnesia opens with sparkling finger-plucked chords running up and down the guitar on “Turning of the Tide”, while the narrator gently and cruelly reminds the hooker he’s with that time’s not going to sit still for either of them. That’s followed by “Gypsy Love Songs”, which is a “Calvary Cross”-type dark fantasy with guitar raveup reminiscent of “Shoot Out the Lights.” There’s bittersweet love on display, as usual, in “The Reckless Kind,” “I Still Dream,” and “Waltzing’s For Dreamers” (“Miss, you don’t know me / But can’t we pretend / that we care for each other / till the band reach the end?”). One thing that separates Thompson’s writing from that of most of his peers is his willingness to look past the obvious highs and lows of romance, to the emotional battlefields of adult love, sex, self-delusion, and the genuine messiness of human relations (erotic and otherwise).

The album’s other high points include “Don’t Tempt Me”: a funny, rollicking song where a jealous drunk spews impotent threats at the guy he sees dancing with his girl (“He's putting his hands in the wrong place / Time to rearrange his face / He's gonna dance with me instead /And I'm gonna tap dance on his head.”). The threats get more and more outlandish, but always ending with the futile refrain of “Don't tempt me, don't tempt me / I'm half way out of my seat.” And Thompson keenly centers resentment of American imperialism in the personal and sexual on the perversely catchy “Yankee Go Home”: “Oh, you turned my sister into a whore / With a pair of silk stockings from the PX store / My girlfriend still won’t talk to me / Since she met a sailor from the land of the free / I’m tired of being alone / Yankee go home!”

“Can’t Win” is one of his most frightening songs, detailing the way society tries to hammer children into conformity from day one: “I started to cry, they put gin in my cup / I started to crawl, and they swaddled me up / I got up and run, they said "Easy, son, /Play up, play the game / They said /You can't win. You can't win / Turn the cheek. Take it on the chin. / Don't you dare do this. Don't you dare do that/ We shoot down dreams, we stiletto in the back / Oh, the nerve of some people, the nerve of some people," the last phrase spat out over and over as the guitar solo takes the song out (and the various live recordings he’s done of the song feature some of his most potent guitar work). And the album concludes by informing us that, even today, “we’re all working for the Pharaoh,” a bleak thought.

Amnesia sometimes gets overlooked by Thompson fans because there’s no single track on it that dominates the way, say, “Tear Stained Letter” or “Al Bowlly’s in Heaven” do their respective albums. That’s definitely not the case on the next two albums.

I'll get to Rumor and Sigh next, but a perfect example of the Froom conundrum is "I Misunderstood." Exquisite, simple song, set to a chiming melancholy guitar riff, that works beautifully as a solo piece in concert.

But I can't deny the fact that, on the album version, Froom's production touches underline the mood of the song perfectly, adding value without swamping the material. On this song, he knows just how far to go, and where to back off. But that was always hit or miss with him.

Rumor and Sigh was the first Richard Thompson album released into a marketplace where the CD had supplanted the LP as the primary delivery artifact, and it shares a characteristic with a lot of early CD’s: it’s chock full. And that raises a question: when we’re evaluating an album, do we judge it on the basis of its strongest material, or the rest? Because there are just as many first-rate Thompson songs on Rumor and Sigh as on Hand of Kindness… but in the case of Hand, that leaves maybe three or four other songs; in the case of Rumor, it leaves about eight or nine. So while Hand flows like something organic, Rumor and Sigh feels choppy and distracted. But if you were to trim Rumor and Sigh down to its nine or ten best cuts (and maybe lock Froom out of the studio now and then), you’d have an album as good as any in Thompson’s catalog.

Rumor and Sigh also feels a bit skewed because it is dominated like no other Thompson album by a single song. “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” has been Thompson’s calling card for the past fifteen years; it’s the song everyone expects to hear at a Thompson performance, and it’s made numerous appearances on various TV and radio shows, including Thompson’s live performance of it on A Prarie Home Companion (it was practically NPR’s theme song for a while). And it’s earned all of that. A trad-style tale of doomed love and a vintage motorcycle, it’s propelled by some of the most jaw-dropping acoustic picking Thompson (or any contemporary guitarist) has ever done. The vocal performance, too, is wholly committed and vital, and when the young narrator calls out that “I see Angels on ariels / in leather and chrome / swooping down from heaven to carry me home,” Thompson’s delivery is a stunning mixture of exhilaration and resignation, and the song’s last few lines are the tenderest fossil-fuel-burning benediction since the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby.”

“1952 VBL” (as we insiders call it) is nominally the end of Side One of the album (at least it was on the cassette version), and it tends to make it easy to forget how strong most of the first side was.

“Read About Love” is maybe the hardest-rocking opener of any Thompson album, and it’s a wickedly funny song that absolutely no one (with the exception of maybe Pete Townshend or Ray Davies) could have written: a young man, faced with the refusal of the adults in his life to speak frankly about the “facts of life” turns to his contemporaries for his sexual education (his brother “gave me a book / the cover was plain / written by a doctor with a German name / It had glossy pictures / serious stuff / I read it seven times and I knew it well enough”), and the result is both comic and all too believable, as he tells a girl “When I touch you there / it’s supposed to feel nice / That’s what it said / in ‘Readers’ Advice’ / I do everything I’m supposed to do / If something’s wrong, then it must be you.”

“I Feel So Good” is another gem, as a hoodlum (“I’m old enough to sin, but I’m too young to vote”) gets out of prison and gleefully boasts that he still has “a suitcase of fifty-pound notes / and a half-naked woman with her tongue down my throat.” But the mischief he’s readying isn’t a heist or bank job; he feels so good that he’s “going to break somebody’s heart tonight.” It’s a short, tight, perfectly structured pop song, and Thompson’s guitar break is a model of how much can be done with just a few bars of solo.

I alluded upthread to “I Misunderstood”, and it might be Thompson’s most effective song yet on romantic self-delusion: “I thought she was saying good luck / she was saying goodbye.”

Simple and classic with a tinge of country is “Keep Your Distance,” a sort of achingly wistful inversion of “Dark End of the Street”: “Keep your distance / when I feel you close to me, what can I do but fall / With us it must be all or none at all.”

There’s good fun in “Don’t Sit On My Jimmy Shands” (about a collector of rare records of a Scottish accordionist), some haunting guitar work on “Mystery Wind”, and an unusually bitter-sounding vocal on “God Loves A Drunk”, which is like an answer song for sentimental ballads like Ralph McTell’s “Streets of London”: you can keep your pity, the narrator snarls; he knows a form of salvation unknown to the rest of us: “Will there be any pen-pushers up there in heaven? / Does crawling and wage-slaving win you God's love? / I pity you worms with your semis and pensions / If you think that'll get you to the kingdom above.” That’s eight terrific songs: add in “You Dream Too Much” and “Why Must I Plead” for leavening, and you’d have a fine album without having to bother with the Thatcher-thrashing “Mother Knows Best” or the noodling silliness of “Psycho Street.”

I’ll admit that I tend to listen to this album in small chunks, and probably haven’t played it through in several years. But I never get tired of the best songs here.

Not sure if anyone but Dave's still reading (understandable, given how this thread has grown into a monster beyond even my control), but we continue:

1994's Mirror Blue is a significant album in Richard Thompson’s catalog for three reasons:

1. For the first time, Thompson and producer Mitchell Froom seem in synch about the album’s production. Extra instrumental and vocal textures buoy tracks like “For the Sake of Mary” and “I Can’t Wake Up To Save My Life” instead of weighing them down; and when little more than Thompson’s guitar is called for, the producer steps back. The programming also flows more effectively than was the case on the previous three albums of their collaboration (with one notable exception).

2. Mirror Blue cements one of the great musical partnerships of the past decade or so. Danny Thompson (no relation to Richard) is a widely traveled bass player, best known for his work in Pentangle, a band that followed Fairport Convention onto the British “folk-rock” scene. With their twin acoustic guitar attack of John Renbourne and Bert Jansch, Pentangle needed Thompson’s jazz-oriented acoustic double bass to hold things together. While he’d made appearances on a couple of Richard Thompson’s previous albums, the Mirror Blue selection “Easy There, Steady Now” feels as though it had been written specifically for the two Thompsons: Danny’s playing is astonishing: growing from a thundering rumble to violin-like delicacy, supple and active, supporting Richard while snaking in and around the acoustic guitar lines. From here on, Danny Thompson becomes Richard’s principal bass player on tour (his tone easily standing up to the rigors of full-band electric accompaniment), and on the bulk of his recordings. While I’ve seen Thompson many times over the years, both solo and with bands large and small, I don’t think he’s ever been better than when he and Danny take the stage together as a duet.

3. For the third time in four albums, Richard Thompson comes up with one of the great songs of the late 20th century. “Beeswing”’s arrangement doesn’t call attention to itself in the same way as had “Al Bowlly”’s jazz stylings, or the lightning picking of “1952 VBL”. It’s a simple folk-like melody that features Richard’s acoustic guitar and mandolin, with understated Celtic fiddle and pipes. “Beeswing” is a tale of love, loss, and regret that is so filled with deft detail that it unfolds as clearly as a movie, and to quote it at all would probably do a disservice to the new listener. And while not everyone’s experienced the kind of romance outlined in the song, I’d be astonished to find someone who’s never found themselves regretting some similar choice made in love and/or life. Thompson’s singing is among his best here: it’s a tale the narrator has told before, and while the bitterness has passed, the longing never will; I don’t think I’d have much in common with a heart so cold it wasn’t moved by this song.

Beyond that, Mirror Blue features such delights as “MGB-GT”, which is Thompson’s answer to Chuck Berry and The Beach Boys: a car song about a British car, using tropes of traditional British music; “Shane and Dixie” in which two young lovers’ crime spree and suicide pact go grimly, funnily wrong; “King of Bohemia”, Richard solo with his guitar, telling home truths to a girl he meets in a pub (“Did your dreams die young, were they too hard won / Did you reach too high and fall”); the snarling rocker “Mascara Tears”; and “The Way That It Shows”, a litany of signs of betrayal that would seem an odd choice for Richard’s entry into the “Rock Band” video game, until the dark, moody song gets to about the three-minute mark, at which point it concludes with another two and half minutes of some of the most savage soloing Thompson’s Stratocaster has ever given us. (Still an odd choice for the video game, though, considering how many great solos Thompson has done in songs that would seem to have more immediate appeal to new listeners).

The album’s only real clunker is the sarcastic “Fast Food” which not only (uncharacteristically for Thompson) shoots fish in a barrel (“Shove it in their faces, give 'em what they want / Gotta make it fast, it's a fast food restaurant”), but is an absolutely horrible choice for a song to follow the exquisite “Beeswing.” Mirror Blue redeems itself by concluding with one of the greatest drunken self-pity songs ever: “Taking My Business Elsewhere.”

Mirror Blue is the midpoint in Thompson’s Capitol career (two albums behind him, and two more, one a double-disk set, to come). He seems to have enjoyed a more relaxed relationship with them than he ever had with a major label before; possibly his various side projects gave both partners room to breathe. In any case, Mirror Blue remains the album from his time with Mitchell Froom that feels most like an integrated listening experience.

There must be a word for the level of persistence I seem to be displaying here…

Anyway, going to try to move this along a bit more quickly; that’s not to say that Thompson’s more recent work isn’t worth detailed consideration—it definitely is, as each album contains at least three or four songs among the best that anyone released in their respective years—but there’s a limit, and in terms of reader interest, I seem to have reached it.

1996’s you? me? us? (Thompson's final album with producers Froom and Tchad Blake) is an odd piece of packaging: a two-disc set that was sold at a somewhat reduced price, but which contained barely more music than one CD (and, had either of the two songs that appear twice been cut back to once, it would have in fact fit on one CD). The idea is that one disc is played with full band (“voltage enhanced”) while the other is “nude” (just Richard’s voice and guitar, sometimes alone, but more often with Danny Thompson's bass, a bit of fiddle, or other acoustic accompaniment). While this bifurcation might have been intended to hook the “Unplugged” fans, it didn’t do much for the album’s flow. Which is a pity, as it’s the usual outstanding fare. The electric set features plenty of great guitar, with high points including the acid “Put It There Pal” (an over-the-top song to a backstabber that is like a funnier version of Dylan’s “Idiot Wind”), the creepily predatory “No’s Not A Word,” and the giddy “Am I Wasting My Love On You?”.

But the album is overbalanced by the strength of the songwriting on the “nude” set. Virtually every track is told with a cinematic perfection of detail, with the lament of “She Cut Off Her Long Silken Hair”, the infinity of regret in “Burns Supper,” the catchy breakup-and-happy(!)-ending story of “Train Don’t Leave,” and three of Thompson’s alltime greats: “Cold Kisses,” where the narrator sneaks a look at his lover’s old photo album (“Old boyfriends big and small / Got to see how I measure up to them all / This one's handsome, not too bright / This one's clever with his hands alright / Tougher than me if it came to a fight”); “Sam Jones,” who tells his story of being a “bone man” on a lifetime of battlefields: “I've seen battlefields white with human ivory / Noble dukes and princes stripped of flesh and finery / When the crows have done their job, they say that's the time for me / Sam Jones deliver them bones”, sung to an eerie, rough-hewn melody that recalls the best of Fairport Convention, and concluding with “Woods of Darney,” where a soldier finds a wedding picture clutched in a dead comrade’s hands, goes in search of the woman, and their story.

Maybe, again, it’s the packaging or presentation, but this album for some reason gets overlooked by many Thompson fans, who hailed his next album as some sort of “comeback.” Why anyone thought he needed to “come back” after you? me? us? is beyond me. Disc two alone would have been one of the outstanding albums of 1996, and Disc one wouldn't have been that far behind.

I'll certainly agree about my preference for Teddy's participation. Owen's not a bad singer, but after watching her in the "1000 Years of Popular Music" DVD, tossing her long hippie mane dramatically and attacking every song like the next Piaf, I started to get irritated just hearing her.

(I also didn't learn until recently that she's married to Harry Shearer; I might have cut her more slack if I'd known).

Actually, the vocal partner I wish Thompson had worked with more was Shawn Colvin (who once married and subsequently divorced Richard's tour manager, IIRC). She opened for (and sang onstage with) Richard in the early 90's, and I'm really sorry that, so far, none of that live material has been issued.